We consider the effects of school quality on health using the introduction of the Rosenwald schools which expanded educational opportunities for African Americans living in rural areas of the South during the early part of the 20th century. Prior research has shown that the Great Migration...

We examine inferences about old age mortality that arise when researchers use survey data matched to death records. We show that even small rates of failure to match respondents can lead to substantial bias in the measurement of mortality rates at older ages. This type of measurement error is...

Using data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), we construct two measures of the longevity of older wives and husbands. For definiteness, we focus on couples in which the wife was 60 and the husband 62 in 1988. Our first measure utilizes a 4 x 4 "longevity matrix" in which the bins...

This paper begins an exploration to determine whether earnings growth, as a measure of the propensity to invest in human capital, is a valuable variable for predicting mortality. To insure its robustness and general applicability to ongoing Social Security models, the usefulness of earnings...